For literary novelists the past is pressing

There's nothing new about historical fiction being a popular genre in books, movies, and ATV. I guess the author's point is that all of a sudden, historical fiction novels are winning major awards typically given to books in the genre that is named literary fiction.

Here's the thing: it's not that historical fiction has come up in the world, or suddenly gotten good enough, or popular enough to be noticed. It's that literary fiction is largely irrelevant to most people — even the fraction of people who still read at all — and has been getting less relevant for decades. Most other genres are more relevant than literary fiction: to the culture, by sales, whatever.

By which, I mean that it's not that these authors and awards committees are deigning to dip their toes into genres they wouldn't have before, it's that they're jumping on board a bandwagon rather than getting left behind.

I think there are actually two things going on. And the authors that article is doting on (sorry, Franzen isn't good) are just tapping into them.

1. Some books are chasing the past for its aesthetics or gravitas. One version of this is trying to reinvent old mythologies you loved as a child. Another is to write a novel about a child growing up in 1930's Germany and now it's a serious novel worthy of serious attention by serious critics.

If either of those are your jam, that's cool.

2. The other is escaping the present time, for a writer, sets you (and your readers) free from our politics and our cell phones and our knowledge, under a strange set of social norms where traveling long distances and sharing information are real hurdles.

One of my favorite books these days is Dexter Palmer's "The Rabbit Queen," about a hoax from the point of view of the fooled physicians in 1726. Yes it's based on real events, but it can also have characters and situations that would never work or even make sense if set in modern times.

>The historicizing impulse has crept into other media as well — notably television. Dramas originally set in the present day are currently being rewritten to take place in earlier decades — the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

that is a far cry from the early 20th century or 19th century

Patrick O'Brian is evidence for me that fiction set in the past can illuminate my present. He wrote believable and complex (fictional male) characters, interacting in interesting ways, through lightly fictionalized real events with humor and a fair amount of ripping yarn/daring-do.

For some writers a genre is a crutch - a thousand steel-capped dreadnoughts tearing through the yielding fabric of feebly protesting spacetime blah blah. For others, and O'Brian is the best I've come across, the genre is the constraint that forces true creativity.

I think it is reasonable to observe that his female leads (modulo Clarissa Oakes maybe) are a bit cardboard cutout.

Could not read full article due to paywall, but the claim that Mantel made a positive contribution to Historical Fiction is hard for me to agree with it. Her text is sparse and abstract (that is it is absent the historical context, and concrete depictions of minutiae of the time period), lacking in poetry, her characters speak, think and act as they were living in our times, that I have a hard time considering it as historical fiction itself. What modern Historical Fiction aspires to the grandeur of the works of Walter Scott?

I hit a paywall.